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Somehow I always feel uneasy in the face of the great masters whose work middle-class people like me usually absorb early in life with a certain level of cultural automatism imposed on us by the notion of common education. My uneasiness stems from the fact that the great masters inevitably make me question the sincerity of my appreciation, which (I know all too well) came packaged with a certain style of upbringing. Every encounter with “high ...

Strange maps

by J Lee | | in Culture , Technology , Visual Art

Back in grad school I read Anne McClintock’s book Imperial Leather, which begins, if memory serves (the book is in storage in the U.S.) with a map. A map may seem like a neutral tool, but it is also a code, a decipherer of geography, and this particular one was imbued with the hopes and fears of a generation of explorers and colonizers. This tool draws its power – its ability to speak to and restructure our perception of space—from the potent...

The Armory Show

by D Kuan | | in Visual Art

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My feelings approaching last weekend's Armory Show were mostly those of dread and trepidation. So much art, so many hipsters. Were the inevitable sensory overload and physical exhaustion going to be worth the chance to see the biggest art fair of the year? Plus, there was a 20 dollar admission fee, which is usually enough reason to give me pause before going to any MoMA show. I hemmed and hawed for a long time, then finally bit the bullet. I g...

Against Purity

by S L Kim | | in Books , Culture , Visual Art

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock is the lightly edited book version of the six Andrew Mellon lectures Kirk Varnedoe gave in 2003 at the National Gallery, just a few months before he died of cancer at the age of 57. After 12 or 13 years as the director of painting and sculpture at MoMA, Varnedoe left the post in 2001 for a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ to devote his time to writing.

10 Tracks I Was Glad to Rip in 2006

by H Saussy | | in Culture , Books , Music , Technology , Visual Art

As I start this list, I can’t be sure what it will look like. Reader, you are seeing me examine my conscience and memory in real-time. I was going to list my ten favorite books of 2006, but a few other things began to obtrude that weren’t books, but had become part of my thinking during this year. So I assimilate them all, in the spirit of multimedia, to things “ripped” to my operating memory: scans lodged on the hard disk, items of mental fur...

States of Emergency

by K Klingensmith | | in Visual Art

Steven Meisel (the fashion photographer responsible for, among other things, Madonna’s book Sex) has a spread in the September issue of Italian Vogue called “State of Emergency.” If you don’t get Italian Vogue, you can see scans of the images here or watch a slideshow of the pictures put together by Vogue.

Portraits of Tiananmen

by C Rojas | | in Visual Art , Politics (China)

In a famous scene in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 classic To Be or Not to Be (about a Polish acting troop during the period of Nazi occupation), the director of the embedded play (“Gestapo”) complains that the actor playing Hitler does not resemble the Fuehrer, and instead is “just a man with a little moustache.” The director, casting about for a model to illustrate what he is looking for, sees a photograph on the wall and exclaims, “That...

The Importance of Being Important

by E Hayot | | in Visual Art , Academic Life (Scholarship)

"Important works of art embody important innovations. The most important works of art are those that announce very important innovations." &nbsp So begins David W. Galenson's recent working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, "The Most Important Works of Art of the Twentieth Century." Something about these opening sentences makes me cringe. I locate it not so much in the content, which makes an argument I can imagine having, a...

Thou Shalt Not, or Thou Hadst Better Not

by H Saussy | | in Politics , Religion , Visual Art

The sequels of the Danish caricatures of Mohammed seemed to me a made-for-Printculture moment. See here for some good round-the-kitchen-table action. An issue on which reasonable disagreement was rather lacking, IMHO, until our crew got busy on it. For a dismaying—because at least partly reasonable—take on the situation, see the "We Are All Danes Now" article in the Boston Globe the other day,

Their Eyes Were Watching You

by H Saussy | | in Visual Art , Culture , Religion

Some baroque churches have painted ceilings that look as though some kind of happy bomb had torn through the building, revealing a blue sky full of gesticulating saints, glowing clouds, sometimes a skewed beam or two of the exploded building you are still in, and of course, filling every corner, hundreds of smiling winged babies. &nbsp The theme of these ceilings is always a “Triumph”: Saint Ignatius vaulting into heaven, applauded by the ange...

Ed Ruscha, Part II

by S L Kim | | in Culture , Visual Art , Time

(Read my previous entry on Ruscha here. ) Ed Ruscha’s “Course of Empire” is a revisiting of previous works, both his own and another’s: First, the title of the exhibition is borrowed from a series of five paintings from the 1830s by Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole called “The Course of Empire.” These paintings are part of the New York Historical Society’s permanent collection. At the Whitney, reproductions of the paintings are mounte...

What I Like About Ed Roo-SHAY

by S L Kim | | in Culture , Places , Visual Art

For the second time, I tried to see the Egon Schiele exhibit at the Neue Galerie in New York, only to find out that the museum is closed on Thursdays of all days. Because the trip to New York was already planned, my husband and I went to the Whitney instead to see Ed Ruscha’s “Course of Empire” paintings, which had shown at the 2005 Venice Biennale. I’d first seen Ruscha’s work in a Los Angeles County Museum of Art retrospective in the late ‘...

Don't Panic

by K Klingensmith | | in Photography , Technology , Visual Art

In the last week or so both Nikon and Minolta announced that they will discontinue the manufacture of film cameras and focus on their more profitable, more popular digital lines. Minolta also plans to stop making 35mm film. Reading this news in the press the situation for photography seems dire. One writer sees in Minolta’s decision the “demise of traditional film photography gather[ing] pace,” while another accuses Nikon of putting “anothe...

The Artist and His Artists: "I Know What You're Doing"

by S L Kim | | in Culture , Books (Nonfiction) , Visual Art

I’m about 100 pages from the end of De Kooning: An American Master, the biography I’ve been reading for the past few weeks. It’s still a gripping read, even though there’s inevitably some repetition of themes and the writing occasionally gets carried away by its own dramatic flourishes, especially when the authors pause to describe de Kooning’s paintings in detail. Instead of trying to do a grand summation of the ...

De Kooning in the Details

by S L Kim | | in Culture , Books (Nonfiction) , Visual Art

<%image(20050713-deK-Valentine1947.jpg|299|450|Willem de Kooning, Valentine 1947)%> Valentine 1947 I’m nearly half way through the 600+ page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of 20th-century Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning, written by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan and published last year. Apparently, the project took over 10 years to complete, and you can see why: the authors seem to have scoured the archives for both publis...

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